Best books of 2019: Film

Ayoade on Top , by Richard Ayoade, Faber, RRP£12.99/$17

If the narrative delights of 2003 romcom View From The Top had until now escaped you, comic multi-hyphenate Ayoade offers a forensic close reading of the unloved box office flop starring a pre-Goop Gwyneth Paltrow as a lovesick flight attendant. The film, of course, is terrible — the humour droll and discreetly acidic.

Say What Happened: A Story of Documentaries, by Nick Fraser, Faber, RRP£20/$25

The year 2019 makes the ideal backdrop for this flavourful history of the documentary — a mass of non-fiction crowding the Netflix menu while off-screen facts are ever more imperilled. Fraser takes us back to the beginning of the form to set in motion a guided tour delivered with snap and insight.

Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J Hoberman, New Press, RRP$28.99

Long before the US presidency became the vehicle of a reality TV star, it was the province of a former Hollywood male lead — and the industry that made Ronald Reagan famous responded to his power with a rash of subtext-heavy blockbusters. Hoberman spurns easy 1980s nostalgia to map the grey zone where politics and pop culture meet.

The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History, by Nathalia Holt, Little, Brown, RRP£25/$29

As Disney’s Frozen 2 sweeps through cinemas, Holt’s secret history of female animators opens amid the frenzy of the 1930s Mouse House production line. From there, she unfolds a suitably painstaking account of fairytale princesses, Pinocchios and Alices in Wonderland inked into immortality by an unsung string of harried, mistreated, and hugely gifted women.

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, by Karina Longworth, Custom House, RRP£20

Seventy years before #MeToo, no studio mogul kept the lives of so many gifted women bound up with his power plays as Howard Hughes. Longworth, a contemporary sage of old Hollywood, focuses with an eye for morselly detail and a widescreen lens on those women — the multitasking talent that was Ida Lupino, the indelible Ava Gardner.

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